Pros:
+ Extremely innovative and interesting metroidvania with an engaging story, lore and focus on philosophical themes
+ Tens of cool weapons to obtain and almost every one of them is useful in different situations
+ Fascinatingly unique abilities, upgrades
+ Amazing art and character designs
+ Graphics pop really well on handhelds like the Switch
+ Really good music for the most part, even listenable outside of the game which isn't always a given in metroidvanias (check out Cellular Skies if you're unsure)
+ Fun to speedrun
+ Sets up an infinitely entertaining storyline that I can't wait to see completed

Cons:
- For such a fascinating and deeply layered game, its ending and final boss is a bit of a letdown. Not spoiling anything, but the main character is seemingly given an option to choose his ending or at least affect it in some way, but then it's not carried through. In general, the ending feels just a tad bit unfinished even though the rest is phenomenal
- Secret Worlds should maybe be just a bit easier to find
- A few tracks can get a bit jarring when repeated, like Inexorable
- Music also doesn't properly loop around, the tracks just abruptly end and start back up from the beginning again without any mixing which can break immersion
- Some bosses are great, while others are easy button-mashers if you know the exact place where to stand
- Fast travel can be a bit of a pain and is improved upon greatly in the sequel
- Some weapons and abilities feel a bit clunky to use with the aim lock controls

Pros:
+ Best story mode out of any Smash game
+ Great music
+ Excellent side content
+ Cool first-party newcomers
+ Last game to have Target Mode
+ First Smash game to include a Stage Builder

Cons:
- Nearly unplayable as a competitive game, due to
• Tripping
• Very little hitstun so true combos are difficult to impossible to execute with most characters
• Extremely unbalanced characters, with Meta Knight and Ice Climbers being some of the only viable ones in higher competive play
- Art style feels dated and especially doesn't look good on a 480p Wii

TL;DR: A masterclass in game design in nearly every way, Tears of the Kingdom improves upon almost every single aspect of its predecessor tenfold. A much bigger, more interesting world, expansively useful new abilities, countless new and deeply fascinating mechanics to learn, as well as multiple (at least partially) amended weaknesses of the original, like improved weapon durability and increased usefulness for each and every item you collect.

Being a serious Game of the Year contender, there is very little holding Tears of the Kingdom back from the spot. Just like Breath of the Wild that came before (whose score I've had to retroactively decrease now that such a better sequel exists), it just might be one of the defining games of this entire decade.

Pros:
+ Improves on previous game's issues like weapon durability, way too situational abilites and making items more valuable and multi-purposed
+ Much more interesting tutorial area, with all of the overall additions to the overworld feeling very much substantial and worth the game's price
+ Combat and general enemy encounters have been improved hugely with new abilities (some of the new enemies are especially fun to challenge)
+ Despite being a direct ripoff of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, the building mechanic is incredibly fitting for the game and works flawlessly. The year they delayed the game for just to iron out any problems or bugs clearly paid off, a certain Game Freak could learn from Nintendo.
+ The game has clearly been optimized to handle way more individual entities on-screen at the same time (at least compared to its predecessor, where you could seriously slow the game down with just a few electric weapons on the ground)
+ Excellent influence from Hyrule Warriors with the new bigger enemy camps and allied soldiers
+ A huge surprise bubbling beneath the surface even for people who watched the trailers
+ All pros from Breath of the Wild carry over to this game


+/- While the overall story and lore of the game is pretty good and definitely better than Breath of the Wild's, there are way less interesting character moments, which is weird since you actually spend much more time with every character in this game than you did before. Especially egregious is how each regional character's arc concludes with a nearly identical cutscene in both visuals and dialogue, which I won't spoil further. Needless to say, the focus in this game's development definitely went to the gameplay and world, not its story beats. Then again, Miyamoto hates having stories in games, so that might just explain it.
+/- I actually think the new champion abilities are much more interesting and balanced, but their controls are so clunky and bad that you almost never have the chance to properly use them. Only half of them are context-specific, so the others have to be activated by physically walking up to the champion.

Cons:
- Weak voice acting makes an unwelcome return in this game, as Nintendo is seemingly unable to give proper direction to its VAs. Characters like Sidon especially sound even more wooden and performative than before.
- Even though I did mention that the overworld additions are worth the game's asking price, I do have to say that many areas of the game's sky are sorely lacking in floating islands that could've really make it feel like a comparably huge part of the world with the surface.
- Not completely part of the game itself but I'd like to mention here that it's a damn shame the game's not getting DLC :(

Pros:
+ Best game in the trilogy
+ Combines everything that worked in 1 and 3 to make the near-perfect Metroid Prime experience
+ Very interesting lore
+ Arguably most difficult game in the trilogy which is appreciated
+ World is designed to be the easiest and most convenient to backtrack out of any game in the trilogy
+ Closest to a horror game the franchise has been alongside Fusion and Dread
+ Character designs are the absolute best in the trilogy, with Samus' suits being a major highlight
+ One of the best item progressions out of any metroidvania
+ Main mechanic of switching between Aether and Dark Aether creates very satisfying puzzle elements

Cons:
- Aside from a few key locations, the entire world is very drab and samey-looking (while this does add to the world's realism, it detracts from the stunning vistas that 1 and especially 3 are able to offer)
- Music mostly isn't as memorable as in 1, but still a bit better than most in 3
- Boss designs oftentimes look almost identical aside from a few great exceptions

Pros:
+ Literally the only turn-based RTS I’ve ever been interested in trying, and it was worth it
+ Great gameplay, the movement and overall experience is way more fast-paced and filled with different unique options than you would expect from a turn-based game
+ Really fun characters and world
+ Lots of different weapons and cosmetic hats to collect
+ Simple fun while still being really challenging at times
+ One of the best OSTs in a game I’ve ever heard, having been composed by steampunk band Steam Powered Giraffe (and you can even find them in-game in the space bars!)
+ After playing SteamWorld Dig 2 a few years earlier, its events directly and faithfully lead to this game and I wasn’t disappointed

Cons:
- So short for its genre :( only around 20-25 hours even if you 100% the game
- New Game+ doesn’t change the game substantially enough
- While it’s great that most levels are procedurally generated, they could have more different themes. They’re effectively all just differently colored spaceships with some different hazards. Maybe there could be one where a station is built on an asteroid, for example?

Pros:
+ Insanely interesting and creative platforming
+ Fun to 100%
+ Groovy music
+ Funny characters
+ Fascinating world design
+ While the game is on the smaller side, it's a great proof of concept and doesn't cost much

Cons:
- Lighting - especially in the sunset levels - can make the game look really ugly and basically remove the nice cel-shading -like effect from the rest of the game
- While the controls do work, it does feel like the character's game feel could still use a bit more polish (maybe by adding hurtbox balls inside the snake's movement rail)
- 100%:ing the game is fun, but it comes with no reward at all

Pros:
+ Pretty fun with both pro and casual players alike, even years later
+ Surprisingly deep strategizing and gameplay
+ Great stages
+ Solid music
+ Decent story mode with some fun bosses (except the second-to-last one is absolute bull with its weak points and downtime duration)
+ Konami’s other Special-class characters add some interesting variety
+ Lots to unlock from stages to accessories for your characters

Cons:
- It was 50€ at launch 💀💀💀
- Not that fun alone
- Money takes forever to grind even with the fastest strategies. It should’ve been rewarded from matches depending on how long they last so you got more of it passively while playing with friends, for example
- Can get boring pretty quick if you don’t switch between other party games

Pros:

+ Some of the best visual fidelity out of any Wii game
+ Concept is interesting, following Samus directly after Super Metroid but before Fusion. I think there is a story to be told there. Same with the 3D platformer perspective as opposed to the Prime games' FPA approach.
+ Combat is idiotically simplistic, but admittedly still kind of fun
+ The origin/evolutionary line the game gives for Ridley's species is absolutely excellent. I love the idea that the huge, spiky space pirate we know and love from the other games was originally a tiny, white-colored and furry Little Birdie. This minor factoid is literally the single best thing about this entire godforsaken game, and that's saying something.


Cons:

- Level and world design is repulsively bad. I'm no stranger to linear hallways in 3D Metroid games, Prime 3's my favorite Prime game after all, but the way Other M does it is especially horrid. Environments are rarely - if ever - interesting-looking, with seemingly all depth and detail having been sucked out of them. Each area in the game is basically just a circular road (with little to no crossroads) you shoot through rather than an interconnected world. It doesn't even make sense in the context of being inside a Federation research vessel. Why are all of the doors decorative instead of actual shortcuts? At least Fusion's linear areas still had interesting theming, and Prime 3 especially so. Prime 3's linearity was also alleviated with the fact that you could call your gunship to different parts of the world and cut on the backtracking. Other M's seemingly infinitely generating hallways are so bland, that you couldn't describe or discern any different traits about them without looking at the map.

- I'll mention the core upgrades later as part of the story breakdown, but the rest of the item progression is also very bad for seemingly non-story-related reasons. The specific location of Energy Tanks and Missile Upgrades are directly shown on the map so the linear hallways don't even have the benefit of fleshing them out by housing secret upgrades in interesting spots. There is almost zero reason to backtrack, ever. It's effectively not even really a metroidvania other than by name.

- For some reason, the game's director decided it would be a good idea to design the game to be played with a single horizontal Wii Remote. The outcome is as you'd expect: a game focused on fast-paced combat and precise three-dimensional movement makes you use a tiny D-Pad and three other main buttons on the controller. Yoshio Sakamoto claimed this would improve the developers' creativity in designing around the controller's limitations, but what it actually did is force the developers to make the rooms so narrow and dimensionally straightforward that you basically just keep running forwards and occasionally turning left or right. Perhaps the most hilarious part of the controls, however, is the fact that to increase your missile ammo you have to lift up your Wiimote, and to precisely aim those missiles you have to start aiming the usually horizontal Wiimote at your screen. Absolutely bafflng.

- While the combat feels fun, it's also moronically easy. You can just spam dodge moves that automatically charge your beam to full, so you're never in a bad situation except when against specific bosses with huge attacks or multiple unreachable enemies shooting projectiles.

- I mentioned earlier that the game's graphical fidelity is high. I chose those specific words, because its actual designs are dog water. The lighting and polygon count looks impressive, sure, but there is no inspiration or detail in any of the characters, environments or backgrounds. Samus' suit is one of - if not the worst - in the entire franchise, with its smooth edges, minimalistic depths and lack of any striking elements (aside from its color) making it look like a generic mecha suit from a B-tier anime from the early oughts.

- Following the uninteresting visual designs, Other M's music is also either forgettable at best or offensively bad at worst. It's so bad that Smash Ultimate didn't even bring any of its music over from Smash 4, where it was used for the Pyrosphere stage inspired by Other M.

- Other M is extremely derivative (light-to-medium spoilers incoming). It's full of fanservice, got barely any ideas of its own and even when it does, they are executed horribly. The game has a fake Ridley that fails to explain Neo Ridley's existence in Fusion (because lore accuracy was never the point, the developers just thought that they need a Ridley in the game). It has a Queen Metroid, a "Mother Brain" and even a Phantoon, just because they're bosses that people would recognize from previous Metroid games. The game even has a sequence referencing the Zero Suit Samus section from Zero Mission's ending, because the developers didn't know how to properly finish up the story. The entire game incoherently mashes up uninspired retreads of previous elements like this, trying to fill up the holes left open by its embarrassingly unengaging narrative and gameplay.

- Next are some story spoilers, which you don't have to read through, but rest assured, you would not have fun with the core gameplay of this game even if you completely ignored the horrible narrative tying it all together.


(FULL STORY SPOILERS are next, please don't scroll lower if you want to experience it for yourself, for some reason. I don't usually do this for games I review as I like to keep them spoiler-free, but so much of why Other M doesn't work is directly tied to its lore that I can't not talk about it.)

Cons regarding story:

- As mentioned above, Other M fails to create a story that follows any logic or canon, even contradicting itself during the course of the game. I'm not a person who usually cares for a deep story, but Other M fails in its narrative so incredibly badly that it - for once - actively hurts the experience of the game, and even the entire Metroid franchise in general. It's so indescribably bad, that I needed to write this entire separate section of my review.

• Firstly and worstly, Samus' characterization. It's all over the place, and definitely not consistent to this or previous games. She is written to be way more submissive, dependent on outside (male) help and generally being nothing like the silent badass she appeared as in previous or later games. Even her suit reflects this deep misunderstanding of her character: it's sleeker, presents more feminine, and is stripped of any of the general and menacing androgynous efficiency that her previous iterations exhibited. The most egregious example of the butchering of Samus' character undoubtedly comes in the form of her having a PTSD trigger attack when she sees Ridley again at roughly the midpoint of the game. This makes zero sense, and proves the developers did not care to follow any logical consistency.
Even if you only account for the 2D Metroids that occur prior to this game's story, she has met and defeated Ridley three times already. If you also want to include the more canonical Metroid Manga as well as the Prime saga that had released at the time (as you should), she's fought Ridley at least 7 times. And seen him without fighting him even more often. It makes less than zero sense that she is having a PTSD attack right now, in Other M.

• Adam isn't how he is in Fusion, either. Fusion's AI Adam is cold-hearted, calculative and logical, sure, but it's implied that's just because he's a computer. He softens at the end of that game and Samus also describes him as a caring commander when she still worked for him directly. But not in Other M.
The Adam players see in Other M is not the same person. He's rude, commanding, unimpressive as a role model and even genuinely stupid. He exhibits none of the traits Samus gushed over in Fusion. I wouldn't even have a problem with Samus idolizing Adam in this game if he actually reflected the description that Samus gave of him, but he's just not a likeable character. Not even in a flawed, Tony Stark-like way.

• The biggest issue about Adam also relates to one of the biggest issues with the entire game: the upgrade authorization system. With respect to the developers, they actually tried to explain why Samus loses all of his upgrades at the beginning of every game. Too bad their explanation is horrible, and the lore is genuinely better off without it. Samus apparently has all of her upgrades already downloaded onto her suit or something, but she chooses not to use them. When we meet her at the beginning of the game, she's using her Power Suit for some reason. This makes zero sense if she was just flying around alone, then being summoned to the Federation's ship. When Samus meets Adam, she's ordered not to use her upgrades, for... vague, incomprehensible non-reasons. Adam says he'll only "authorize" certain upgrades if Samus seems to need them and he feels like being nice. My three favorite, worst examples of this authorization system in action go as follows:
1: Samus is in Pyrosphere, an area of the huge ship with a dangerously hot climate. She's been in the insulated areas for now, so it hasn't been a problem, but she could've already received her Varia Suit earlier to protect her from possible heat attacks, but isn't given it earlier for whatever reason. The point where she's "authorized" to use a life-saving suit modification is when a monster destroys the tube she's running through and she's already in a molten environment. Adam sees Samus' health already getting drained by the elements and at that point chooses to allow Samus use the Varia Suit.
2: In another part, in Cryosphere, Samus is trapped in a glass box by her enemies. These enemies can shoot her through the box's walls, but Samus can't shoot back to disable the trap. Only after multiple seconds of evading attacks does Samus finally get authorization to use the Wave Beam so she can shoot the enemies through walls. Amazing.
3: Finally, close to the end of the game, Samus is about to fly out of a vacuum hatch in the ship, literally being meters away from getting sucked out into outer space. Adam is unresponsive in her pleas to authorize the Gravity Suit, so she activates the suit upgrade herself. Samus has had the ability to authorize the upgrades herself all this time, but chose to threaten her own life to enable Adam's weird and idiotic power fantasy.

• The main villain of the game is Mother Brain, or Melissa Bergman, or "MB". She's the titular "Other M" in the title, as in another M, another Mother Brain. I know, very clever. Apparently the Galactic Federation preserved a version of the original Mother Brain as a human scientist, who then went rogue on the Bottle Ship and employed all of the different enemies to attack the Federation so MB could take escape and take control of the Metroids once again. To accomplish this, she changed her name to Melissa Bergman (maintaining her initials for whatever reason) and blended in with the scientists so she could enact her plan. Unfortunately for her, she was caught. Now, if this plan and character sounds idiotic to you, rest assured, it is.

• All of the supporting side characters are also mostly very bland and uninteresting. The game has no real deep themes to be had, despite seeing itself as a serious piece of media. For whatever reason, the developers actually thought this material was good enough to warrant a "Movie Mode" in the game, which just plays all of the game's cutscenes in order.

• Most of the dialogue is simplistic, thesaurus-filled fluff. The director doesn't know how to write believable characters, so half the time Samus is just monologuing about how the baby Metroid saved her at the end of Super Metroid.


TL;DR, don't play this game. Trust others when they tell you it's bad. Sometimes your psychological wellbeing has to go above the principle of playing a game before criticizing it.

Pros:
+ Excellent, even addictive core gameplay
+ All of the different types of cars look great and feel unique with all of their stats, hidden attributes and occasional special abilities
+ Expansive maps with lots of interesting roads and strategizing, including entire secret areas only accessible from certain sneaky passes
+ Big Surf Island, while feeling a bit separated from the main map, is an immaculate and enjoyable addition to the already huge world of Paradise City
+ Music selection is really great even if it’s on the older side of rock and punk (though it’s weird how only royalty-free classical music plays at night)
+ So many missions of different types to clear and collectibles to obtain, with Breath of the Wild’s Korok-like Billboards, Super Jumps and ”Smash” fences to drive through everywhere as well as countless achievements to get
+ Haven’t had the chance to try the online multiplayer on the remastered version but I can recall from the original on PS3 that local multiplayer was really fun

Cons:
- You support EA by buying the game (try not to think about it)
- Most likely related to the fact above, the absolute biggest issue with the game are the freezes/crashes. About 40-50% of the time the game will crash when you open up an ongoing session of play. On Switch this means putting the console on sleep mode while playing the game and later returning to play it again. The screen will freeze in the last moment you played, and the background noise will stack and loop indefinitely. Apparently this issue also exists on PC, where if you Alt+Tab or otherwise switch out from the game and try to come back the game will be frozen. Hopefully they fix this one day, but knowing EA they probably won’t.
- Usually the cars’ breaking physics are great, but sometimes it feels like you’ve barely scraped by another car at like 20 km/h and still get totally wrecked, TL;DR some specific cars are made out of styrofoam for no discernible reason
- If you want to cancel a mission while doing it, the only way to do so is to come to a complete stop in momentum and not pressing any buttons for 3 seconds. This may not sound so bad, but it can get real boring and annoying real fast if you’re grinding an especially tight time trial
- The toy cars and some other ones are missing proper breaking physics, so when you get Wrecked it just looks like your car stopped in front of a wall
- Graphics are great for their time, but feel a bit dated nowadays even though the remaster has done a solid job at maintaining their polish
- The online multiplayer may have some flaws that I will include here when I’ve played it sufficiently

TL;DR: I feel like it's kind of unnecessary to complain about the obvious shortcomings that the Game Boy imposed upon this game. I feel it's much more useful to consider the benefits of this game being on GB, that being that it adds to the atmosphere that you can't properly see the screen, and how the backgrounds are so dark. Interestingly enough, this means that the original Metroid II has a better, more faithful ambience than Samus Returns, and some ways even AM2R.

That said, this game is a frustrating play, despite being on the better side of early Game Boy titles. Wouldn't really recommend trying this over replaying Samus Returns or AM2R unless you're a really die-hard fan.

Pros:
+ Best Smash game in most aspects. It has the best…
• characters (most characters, and they’re extremely well made, including the newcomers)
• music (most music from previous games as well as good new remixes. Additionally, the ability to make playlists and even use the Switch as a player through Ultimate’s sound test is great)
• stages
• items
• balancing (people claim Melee is a better competitive game, but honestly its jankiness and horribly slanted tier list have nothing on Ultimate’s phenomenal balancing act even with 80+ characters. Melee has little excuse with just 26, with ~5 of those being semi-clones too)
• Stage Builder (so many options to make almost anything with the right elements)
• Classic Mode (each character has their own ”route”, which is filled with references to their home series)
+ Spirit Board and Spirits in general are a great concept and are a good way to modify normal games
+ While some of the side content isn’t the greatest, the normal Smash mode’s new options like Squad Strike, Smashdown and Super Sudden Death are all great ways to change up your experience
+ Local Wireless is a great addition, as well as online’s Battle Arenas and Shared Content

Cons:
- Absolutely atrocious online play. How can you mess it up so bad that Smash Wii U ends up being better?
- Why can’t 30-second clips be recorded? Almost no one’s tweeting a funny glitch or cool combo if they have to remember to save the replay, shut down their Switch, take out their SD card and put it in their PC, and drag the video file out. It’s such a weirdly small issue
- Characters’ alternate skins take ages to load on the character select screen for some reason
- Many staple characters like Sonic, Donkey Kong and Ganondorf require an overhaul and don’t represent their more modern games at all anymore, or even their actual abilities in Ganon’s case
- Multiple Echo Fighters aren’t nearly as different as they could be, with Dark Samus (for example) missing many of her differentiating moves that her Smash 4 assist trophy already had but are absent in Ultimate
- Probably a small thing for most but I dislike how they implemented Ridley, his Down-Air is one of the lamest in the game when it could’ve been his iconic pogo stick tail attack
- Most Final Smashes are butchered in service of lame cutscenes instead of properly unique, interesting or counterplayable ones. I guess they tried to make them competitive, but because they’re unfair and banned anyway it just seems like a useless compromise
- There was huge potential for a Subspace Emissary-level story mode with all of the new characters, which was unfortunately decided against, and we were given World of Light, full of the grindy and samey battles from one to another.
- Some of the new side modes are nice additions like the aforementioned Stage Builder and Classic Mode, but others like Multi-Man Smash and All-Star Smash are neutered to subsections of ”Mob Smash”, for example
- While the Stage Builder is great, why does it restrict playing on them to just 4 players when there’s a certain amount of objects/terrain? Makes no sense to me
- (Not really related to the game itself but I’m writing it anyway: I don’t mind the DLC picks, but their release order was so weird. Why end the first pass with a Fire Emblem character and begin the second one with a B-lister from Arms? Both are fun to play, but it can’t have been the best order to include them in the game knowing Smash players’ reputation to complain. At least we got Hero, Banjo, Steve, Sephiroth and Sora)

TL;DR: Not a game you can properly review with a rating. Not in this day and age, anyway.

The original Pocket Edition is truly a product of this time and nostalgic to look back to, though predictably it doesn't compare to modern versions of Minecraft. And it doesn't have to. It was never supposed to. It was a serviceably solid mobile port of the Minecraft version of its time, and it did it well. From hardware-restrictive workarounds like the cyan rose and the Nether Reactor, to the tiny worlds and small local multiplayer rooms that you were confined to, everything about this game screams "childhood". You can't put a price on that, much less a review score.

I remember one of my first notable builds being an upside down house that hanged from a cliff's underside with chains made out of cobblestone stairs, and another one built on the side of a natural hill to hide the secret vault room I'd constructed behind a painting to hide it from the only other friend who played in that world with me. To this day, I'm proud of myself for finding out that trick without an online video or some other source. All me, placing paintings on open doors.

TL;DR: A really fun platformer for what it's worth, being a browser-based game and all. Almost every character has a unique trait that can be used to pass through specific tasks and obstacles in different levels, which adds a lot of replayability.

Don't remember much else, but I'd say I recommend playing this if you're going through a Papa's marathon. About the first one not so much, since I don't think I ever played it, but I've heard this is basically the same game but much more polished in every way